K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Blasphemy! Three graphical tools

One of the fun things about bouncing around between distros is that you occasionally (or should I say frequently?) see new and interesting software you didn’t know existed.

When I find fun console applications I make a note of trying them out. I also keep lists of surprising graphical ones too, even if I don’t mention them as often.

Here’s one I found interesting, although if I must be honest, I forget where I saw it and so I’ll apologize ahead of time for that omission.

That’s RedNotebook. A while back someone asked about a daily journal application for the console, and I didn’t really have an answer. (Actually, I do have an answer, but the author hasn’t given me permission to write about it. 😉 )

In the mean time though, if you can stomach a graphical application that does something similar, this one is quite comprehensive. Templates, search tools, cloud displays and tagging functions, backup-to-zip-file options and a full export wizard.

It’s very comprehensive, and very light too. On my Arch system it only asked for one python derivative as a dependency, which is rather impressive when you see how much it does.

Here’s another lightweight, albeit graphical tool you might like.

gonvert knows everything, or at least a lot more than I do. (I’d never even heard of a “pony.” 🙄 ) If you do conversions frequently this can come in quite handy.

Of course, conversions against variable rates, like daily currencies, are probably not within its grasp, but there are online tools better suited to that.

And like RedNotebook, this asked for no more in dependencies than a few things I had already installed.

As you might have guessed, this is a nifty interface and reader for Project Gutenberg, which you (had better!) know as a repository for free and classic texts, converted to digital format.

If you you have a digital book or something similar, you’ll probably be interested in gutenpy, if just for its ability to deftly arrange and manage a database of more than 33,000 books, authors, languages, etc.

gutenpy will download them, manage them in a folder for ebooks and serve them hot and fresh whenever you ask. It has bookmarking options, a slew of display preferences and requires no more background software than the other two I listed. Very cool.

And that’s probably good for now. Not everything need be console-based, although it would be fun if a programming guru decided to adopt one of these ideas for text-based systems. Nothing implied in that though, of course. … 😳